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Famous photo tells just a small part of a distinguished military career

By Jessica Maher, Reporter-Herald Staff Writer

Updated:
11/11/2013 02:40:13 PM EST

Sitting in his Loveland, Colo., home, John Gebhardt talks about the work he did at a hospital while serving in Iraq. (Jenny Sparks/Loveland Reporter-Herald)

Loveland, Colo., police officer John Gebhardt gained a certain amount of notice for a photograph taken seven years ago when he was stationed at Balad Air Base in Iraq, but his memory is full of images he believes exemplify far greater acts of compassion.

Like six men gathered around a makeshift crib they'd created — against the rules, technically — for an Iraqi baby who would soon be released from the hospital. Or a somewhat-smushed and extremely well-traveled three-layer cake that a grandmother shipped off because she'd never missed her granddaughter's birthday before. The smile a volunteer put on a new amputee's face by sitting up in a hospital chair all night talking to him.

Air Force Chief Master Sgt. John Gebhardt cradles an injured Iraqi girl at the U.S. military hospital in Balad in 2006. (Photo courtesy of David W. Gilmore Jr./U.S. Air Force)

But there are no photos to accompany those memories, which all took place in the U.S. Air Force Theater Hospital, in Iraq, on the base where Chief Master Sgt. Gebhardt oversaw operations in 2006.

There is a photo, however, of a uniform-clad Gebhardt holding a wounded Iraqi toddler in his arms while they both slumbered in a hospital chair.

That photo has been shared millions of times across the Internet, the subject of news articles and newscasts and ran rampant on blogs and social media. It landed Gebhardt in the national spotlight and brought the Loveland CSO recognition he doesn't really think he deserves.

“I've had too much credit for doing too little,” Gebhardt said last week in his Loveland home. “The photo was just a small example of acts of compassion that went on over there every day, every hour.”

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Sleeping on the Job

Here's how a photo goes 'viral.' It's snapped by a passing Air Force captain who emails it to Gebhardt with the subject line “Chief sleeping on the job again.” Gebhardt forwards it to his wife and continues the joke, writing, “I got a new girlfriend.”

“Then I sent it to some friends and family and said, 'This is why I love my husband,'” Mindy Gebhardt said.

What happened next is anyone's guess. It wasn't until Chief Gebhardt was back home — Kansas, at that time — that the picture started popping up all over the Internet. When it caught the attention of national media, Chief Gebhardt started fielding many questions: What day was the picture taken? What time? And, of course: What happened to the child?

He doesn't have many of those answers. The child — 2 or 3 years old, they think — was brought into the hospital with a gunshot wound to the head. Her family had been executed by insurgents and she was the only one to survive. He picked her up and held her that night because she was having trouble sleeping and human touch had the same soothing effect on her as with any other child.

“It's just what anybody would have done,” Chief Gebhardt said.

After seven years, the photo still has a wide presence online and has resurfaced again and again and in the strangest of places, (Julian Lennon's affection for it, for example). Sometimes it's attached to misinformation — that it is more recent, that it was taken in Afghanistan, that it is propaganda or had been staged.

Chief Gebhardt still gets many letters and emails; he had to delete his Facebook account because it got to be too much.

“Most people want to know what happened to the little girl,” Mindy Gebhardt said. “We wish we had an answer. All we know is that she was claimed by an uncle. We wish we had a happy ending to tell people.”

30-Year Vet

Chief Gebhardt joined the Air Force in 1979 and over the years, Mindy and their son and daughter moved countless times. Their photo albums are categorized by state, not date, Mindy said. Chief Gebhardt's two tours have taken him to Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq, and so on Veterans Day, he thinks not only about those who served but also about the families behind those uniforms.

“For me personally it's about the family who put up with it,” he said. “The easy part is going to work.”

The motto at Balad was “right here, right now,” and with 1,000 operations a month and no telling what would come next through the door, Chief Gebhardt also often played the role of counselor to younger officers. He remembers the enlisted 18- or 19-year-olds who had never been away from home before and suddenly found themselves in a base nicknamed “mortarville” for the frequency in which mortars were fired at them.

“Every time he would call or text, all he kept saying was how proud he was of everyone over there,” Mindy said.

Chief Gebhardt can think of 100 other people at the Theater Hospital alone more deserving of national attention than he was. He doesn't advertise his claim to fame; he's not sure how many of his co-workers at the Loveland Police Department are aware of it, but he doesn't regret the photo going viral either.

“People related to the picture because they know it's their sons, daughters, brothers and sisters, and they all would have done the same thing,” he said.

Jessica Maher can be reached at 669-5050, ext. 516, or maherj@reporter-herald.com. Follow her on Twitter: @JessicaMaherRH.